From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of I Heart Radio Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They call me Ben. We are joined as always with our super producer, Paul Mission controlled decond. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. We're diving into some hidden history today. We're diving into as odd as the phrase may sound, something new about history, because Faulkner was right. Of course, the past isn't even the past yet. History is never over. It's an ongoing conversation. Most people living on the continents of North and South America are comparatively recent arrivals, right, while many people living in both South and North America have a long family history here. Uh. If you look at the larger scheme of human migration across the planet, human beings are kind of a new thing for these two continents. We know roughly, we know ballpark. The story of humanity. Ancestral primates evolved on the African continent and from there our species spread around the globe. However, even today, in on August seven, as we record this, our species still gets bogged down in the details, especially when we get to the timeline. So today's question, when did human beings actually reach the American continents? Here are the facts Most experts within the fields the various fields of science, anthropology, and the like. They agree that the story of the contents of South and North America, at least as we understand them now, they didn't begin with humans on them, or humans were not there very early. These landmasses were home to a lot of creatures, a lot of animals, a lot of flora and fauna well before human beings arrived. And of course, if you're taking the really long look at the Earth, there are millions and millions of years where humans weren't here, but there were other creatures. But the big question for today is how did humans specifically get here onto North and South America. Well, the most common theory is this idea that involves Clovis culture and the Bearing Land Bridge. By about fourteen thousand years ago, the first human beings to reach the America's came by crossing the Bearing Strait, which was this land bridge between the far northeastern part of Siberia and the western the farthest most western part of Alaska. UM. This theory, known as the Bearing land bridge theory, is the one many of us grew up listen hearing about, you know, the school. It actually makes a lot of sense. It's the closest connection between Asia and North America and it only opens when ice is locked up on land and then sea level drops. Yeah, there is a logic here if we're talking about early human migration that we're talking about people basically walking right and probably following sources of food, maybe other animals that they rely on for sustenance. So it makes sense that they would be able to walk to North America from literally the only walkable path, which is this bearing land bridge across the street that you're describing. No, and all of this is based on the idea that early humans were unable to craft some kind of boat or ship that would be able to traverse the Pacific or Atlantic oceans in the way that we, you know, began to be able to do as technology developed. Um that they'll just remember that. That's why scientists always focus on that land bridge because of the walkability as been said. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point, Matt. And you know, let's get in front of the obvious question that many of us are going to immediately ask, which is, why can I not walk across that bridge today? Why do I have to take a boat or a flight, or why do I have to go on a doomed mission to swim the Pacific to reach Asia from the America's Well, it's because we are living in a different time. Back when, according to this theory, people walked from Asia to North America, they were doing so during something called the last Glacial Maximum or l g M. If this comes up so often in conversation that you don't have time to say the whole thing, also known as the previous ice age, the most recent ice age, the most recent ice age, Yeah, the one before the next one, which maybe we'll be around to see. Who knows, Uh, it's I can't I can't rule anything out at this point. So, back when people were traversing the land in this way, much more of Earth's water was existing in solid form in glaciers. And now the difference between then and now is that the sea levels have risen, so the bridge and the land these people walked is underwater, meaning also that much of the evidence of their migration is going to be lost to time, as the conventional wisdom goes, by this time, fourteen thousand, fifteen thousand years ago, humans had migrated across the breadth of South and North America. You go up to modern day Alaska, you've got humans. Go down to Chile, you got humans. The West coast is riddled with them. You go to northeastern Canada, you've got people everywhere. You go down to Florida, boom, same thing, people plus gators this time. So what we're telling you right now is the official, most often told story. And I want to pause here for you guys. Does this track with what with Noel Matt? Does this track with what you learned or were taught growing up about human migration? Basically? Yeah, yeah, this is precisely what what I recall from world history classes both in high school and in college. Essentially what we what we've just described here, the Clovis theory, the closed hunters, and the evidence that we have found of their lives back in those days. And it was a long time ago, but you know, when you look at the span of what we know about humanity and the evidence that we found it wasn't it wasn't that long ago. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I think this story is going to be familiar to many of us because you you grow up in elementary school, middle school, high school, as you said, Matt, you go to college and you'll still hear some version of this. But the problem here is pretty apparent. With every single nude discovery about the ancient past and the story of humanity's migration from one place to the next, well, we find the story gets less and less clear cut. We don't have we we don't have specific points of time and shifts of patterns. Right, we don't have the origin story of humanity. And this is something that has baffled us on this show since before Oh gosh, we like we were doing this show when science discovered new mix tapes of early humanity. Right, Dennis Sylvans, what was the other Homo floriensis? Yeah. Uh. The point I'm making here is that we have been taught a story. We have been sold a narrative in a very authority titive way, but everything we are learning as a species indicates that story is not as accurate as we are led to believe it is when we are children in school. So that's the question, when did human beings actually arrive in the America's Before we jump in, Ben, I just want to dovetail off what you're saying there. We have been sold this essentially and told this all of our lives. Everyone listening right now, I would say, just to make it a little more positive, because it's the best it's the best picture we've been able to paint with the information we've had up to this point, right. And the the problem, I think, the biggest problem that we're going to be tackling today that we have to address, is that once that picture is painted, anytime new information, these new discoveries that you're talking about, Ben, come through, it becomes more and more difficult to convince the painters of that picture that there needs to be some revisions, right because especially if it's a single point or discovery in one place or a discuss, you know, one person's one team's discovery rather than three or four in an area. That's kind of the biggest problem. I see what you're saying, and it's important because we're we're talking about discovering single points of information, right, single instances and what are single instances or examples against a larger body of thoughts, you know what I mean? Oh yeah, And I mean those high school textbooks aren't like infinitely long. They gotta figure out how to tell a version of the story that is as close to the likely scenario as possible and teaches you something about the history of you know, life. But you're right, it is problematic. It can be, for sure, because who you know, there's so much cantankerousness and science too. If people making one discovery and then another crew making something that conflicts with that narrative, and then there's this kind of beef as to how it really happened. But there's a lot of politics wrapped up in it and all of that. So it's interesting for sure to see the way these things kind of take on a life of their own, especially like you said, once the Badgers out of the bag was Ben would Sam. Yeah, that's that's the issue here. We want to be very clear. We're not accusing your history textbook publishers of purposely lying to you, and we are certainly not accusing your favorite history teachers from grade school of lying to you. Teachers work incredibly hard Uh. They are some of the most important people on the planet in my opinion. Uh. And they're not out to beguile and deceive you, hopefully they're they're not supposed to be. However, they're working with the information they have, right, And when we look at the realm of science and how science is communicated or disseminated to the population, we see that to your point, met sometimes people cling to a thing because it is the established fact now that does that. That is indicative of a lack of skepticism or a lack of critical thinking. It's also a very human understandable things psychologically speaking. Right. I don't want to, uh, I don't want to seem as though we are being dismissive or derogatory towards the many people who have spent their entire academic careers studying various incredibly specific aspects of Clovis theory or the current official story of human migration. But I will say in the past, I am sure there are people who spent decades researching one thing and published about it, and then they're there, and then new evidence was discovered that disproved or challenged their life's work, and so they just kind of you know, played it to the left. What am I gonna do after forty five years in the game change my mind? Would be a better world if people did that, but they often don't. Yeah, it's it's another situation where once you have this established fact, you have to go far and beyond to prove that you're that that fact needs to be altered or negated, right you. That's why it becomes so difficult, um to make these big changes to two existing stories. And they are stories. Don't don't don't kid yourself. These are stories that we are constructing based on the things that we have found. And as we tackle this big question today, when did humans arrive in the America's we're going to realize that this thing is much more complicated than we expected. And we'll tell you all about it right after a word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. You see, the timeline is shifting on us. The things we treated with such certitude turn out to be much less absolute than we had imagined. And it again, it goes back to the timeline. I think that's that's a big part of what the three of us are talking about today. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you may recall that we only said human beings were spread across the continents by fourteen to fifteen thousand years ago UM. For authors like Craig Childs, this shows that humanity by this point was most likely already pretty well spread throughout one or more areas of the continents before this. And there's several major theories that explain this. So let's start with a theory that we sort of talked about at the top of the show, UH, the Clovis first theory. This is the idea that the first human migration happened after the last glacial maximum, which is exactly what it sounds like UM, and this migration later went into decline UM, only to be followed up by you know, subsequent waves of humans from other parts of the world. So this connects all of these first inhabitants of the America's with the Clovis culture UM, which is something called a prehistorica paleo American culture that's named for the distinctive stone tools that were found in Clovis, New Mexico in the twenties UM. This also rolls into that bearing land straight idea, which we've talked about in previous episodes and or at the top of this one. So this is your I guess. In the UK they would call it your bog standard explanation for how human beings ended up on these continents. It's strange because this concept existed for a very long time, despite the fact that there were so many questions about it. If you look at the Clovis culture, the Clovis people, you'll find an historical mystery. It's as if they appeared out of nowhere and then suddenly disappeared. Radio carbon dating tells us that what we regard as the people of the Clovis culture appeared in modern day America around nine thousand, two hundred b C. And then five years later they vanished. So the the important distinction there that that you're bringing up now is the idea that these folks came over after that glacial maximum, after that ice age, around the decline of that ice age, they were able to traverse the siege perilous of the Bearing Strait, and they were from there able to spread throughout the continent. But of course this theory did not exist in a vacuum. There are many other theories about early humans arriving on these continents, and for centuries, people have argued back and forth about this even before they could find solid evidence. What I mean by this is, even before we had scientific standards for collecting, cataloging, and contextualizing evidence and information, we had many, many beliefs in civilization about humanity's origin story. On this continent, you will find numerous religions that argue some some version of an original person springing out of whole cloth or in some cases being created by a divine entity on on these continents. And then you will also see further research that's admittedly more secular, uh, that kind of forensically traces what we know about people on the planet on other continents, right like we this is let's just say it coastal migration. Could people have gotten here by boats? Because if you can build a boat, that seems at least a little bit it seems a little bit easier to travel to this new land via watercraft than to walk through the frozen way lands of the bearing straight. Oh. Absolutely, And note here that we're talking about coastal migration and that sounds exactly like you imagine it to be. That is, following along a coast at you know, some distance far enough away from it, but essentially following the water along a coast on a boat of some kind. That doesn't mean going straight out into the ocean right the way the way you can with larger ships and more reliable ships. Now, uh, it's very different. So there are a lot of sources, there are a lot of people institutions, and there's some research that suggests that this may be a possibility coastal migration. So we know for for sure that in places like Japan and parts of Korea South Korea, there have been amazing archaeological discoveries that have found that humans during the Ice Age were able to navigate coastal waters even though it was so frigid and there's ice in many places, they were able to do that, and they were essentially navigating the northern Pacific coasts of what is now modern or what we would consider modern day Japan and Korea and come chaka with with boats. So it's really no stretch to imagine that humans at some point, perhaps we're able to reach the America's by boat using coastal migration. And here's why it makes sense, because you could right at the end of the Ice Age there where we're imagining that people were physically walking across that bearing straight. Perhaps they were on boats just previous to the end of that glacial maximum, or during the maximum, or even after it, taking boats and following the coast, because you'd end up in Alaska, you'd get to British Columbia, then down south to Washington, to Oregon, all along the Pacific coast of what is now the United States. And it's pretty incredible that humanity, even during an ice age, was able to both survive and prosper and even migraine. It's strange to think about the world in in that way, to imagine a contiguous coast. And I like the point you're making that about the watercraft involved, because you know, these aren't cargo ships. These aren't mega yachts or or schooners or frigoteens or pontoons or I'm just naming boat boat words. Now, does anybody else have a boat? Where? What's up? One? You like? No frigate, frigate, yeah, frigging frigate. These were none of those things. These were Yes, these were not even tugboats. They were they were small coastal craft right like brown water Navy kind of stuff. They weren't meant to go into the open ocean. They were just kind of tracing along the line of the coast, but if that coast is never ending, so they're just sort of following a thing, and it's like a video game wherein there, you know there is a larger world out there. You have a rough idea of the parts of the map you've seen, but everything else is obscured, you know what I mean. So so you may as well imagine that you are just always on the same coast of a thing you call the land. Who knows if there's anything other than the land and then you know the water. What is compelling about that to me is what what spurred that movement? And you know, we we discussed we discussed the migration of animals that were used for hunting right for food for the populations, as a possible reason to just continue down the coast if fish populations, maybe because it's obvious that those boats were would be used for fishing purposes, for catching food. Um, you know, I wonder if there was something This is completely just off the top of my head, but I wonder what the thing was that spurred whichever group, however large or small it was, to continue down that coast and just to keep going to see what's what's next. Oh, I wish I knew. I mean necessity, I would imagine, but I wonder if it wasn't, I wouldn't wonder it was a spiritual belief or or um something that's deep inside. I think all of us to just find out, well, there's something over there. Let's let's find out that's inspiring, you know, especially now as the next big step in space exploration may occur within our lifetimes. One one other thing that may have happened just environmentally is people may have just been following the recession of the ice. Depending on where you put them in the timeline, people may have just been going further along the coast because they were able to see more of the coast. I'm not being dismissive. I'm just saying, like it the environment appears to change so slowly that you might not be fully aware of how far you're migrating because you're you know, your grandparents, we're miles away or kilometers away for the rest of the world, and then you two generations later still feel like you're by the edge of the ice. But the ice itself has moved, So I think we're gonna take one more quick break and then we're gonna get into some new discoveries when we return. So um, there have been some efforts recently, some research that's kinda put this traditional narrative on its head a bit um, And that includes some stuff very very recently published just in the last month. In a paper known called the Timing and Effect of the Earliest Human Arrivals in North America, uh Lorena Bassara Valdiva and Thomas I am Um look into a pretty awesome and bizarre discovery. What they found was a piece of limestone from this very specific cave, the Chiquahite Cave in north central Mexico, that could potentially prove that humans actually first arrived on the continent much much early here than that narrative would have us believe, the one we know from school. Yes, uh, I've waited for this, Okay. So, like many of our fellow listeners, we grew up. I don't want to speak for everybody, let me let me clarify. I grew up convinced that there was hidden history everywhere, you know, and I was I was certain, probably just because I was a jerk, that human beings had all these ancient civilizations and that they had a much longer time on these two continents specifically, and without getting into the weeds on all the crazy stuff that's out there, this is different because this is proof. This is quantitative proof that the first people, if people built these tools you're mentioning, all arrived on North and South America, like thirty three thousand years ago. That's nuts just to put, just to put in perspective how much time that is. I hope no one gets mad at me for bringing this up. Was forty years ago, right, So, like, I think that's gonna hit people when you think about thirty three thousand years. Yeah, I mean, let's just pretend that humans live a hundred years, right, that's three hundred and thirty human like human cycles iterations. Yeah. Yeah, it's a it's a very it's very long story. And you know, for quite a while, there would be various people propagating what was essentially some narrative without proof. They would say, you know, I have had a spiritual awakening and I realized that the true story of insert usually specific brand of people here is that they came to modern day South or Central America or North America, uh like after the Fall of Atlantis or the sinking of Lemuria or something. And the problem is they didn't have proof. This is different because this is not tinfoil hat territory. Archaeologists in this cave discovered specifically three deliberately shaped pieces of limestone. They discovered a pointing stone and two cutting flakes. Right now, pending new discoveries, these are the oldest human made tools discovered on these continents. They absolutely do not fit that timeline we were all taught in school. They also they're also just one of several discoveries in this cave. Because this cave is like a an episode of Hoarders where the hoarder is just collecting sediment. The archaeologists spent a lot of arduous time digging carefully through various layers of sediment. It's kind of like a time capsule time machine. And these tools they found are in like the very back of the cave, in the deepest layer of the random rocks and pebbles and bits of sediment that have accumulated there over time. This is important because when we know the layer in which they were found, we have an enormous head start on figuring out when they were left in that layer, and these things were here way before the last glacial maximum, way before the last ice age that occurred, like what between twenty six thousand and nineteen thousand years ago, which means before that, someone was in this cave and they had made tools and they they forgot them. So if you think about it, because somebody did the equivalent of forgetting their keys at home, we are upending the story of human history thousands of years later. We truly are. And we're gonna tell you more about how this discovery was occurred. But I want to jump to another recent article from Nature that was published in July of this year, and it is titled evidence of human occupation in Mexico around the Last Glacial Maximum, and I'm going to read a quick quote from the abstract of it just to give you an understanding what's happening here. It's pretty incredible because not only did they find those limestone artifacts that we're talking about, there are those tools. There was a lot more and there is a lot more still being found right now. So from this article, it states the site yielded about one thousand, nine hundred stone artifacts within a three meter deep stratus stratified sequence, revealing a previously unknownlithic industry that underwent only minor changes over millennia. More than fifty radio carbon and luminescence dates provide chronological control and genetic, paleo, environmental, and chemical data that document the changing environments in which the occupants lived. Now, that is when you're talking about finding proof, right that you could be able to show to another scientist, to fellow sciences and say, hey, look at all of this data we've collected from these things. You're you're talking about several different ways in which they are testing this stuff, with luminescence testing, with radio carbon testing. Um. I mean, it's pretty incredible stuff here, and it really does show that humans were in that cave, as Ben said, way before that ice age. And these researchers and scientists who are there in that cave are continuing and they're gonna keep digging and they're gonna keep looking and who knows what else we're going to discover. But the reason why it took so long to find this stuff, and it will take a long time to probably find more, is because of how difficult it is to reach this location. This is this is kind of a sunk cost for those poor archaeologists. Uh. The lead author of one of those studies is very very clear about how much of a pain in the key stre it is to get to this cave at all. He said that once they got there, Cypriot Arduently by the way, lead author of that that's so you're mentioning, Mattuh, he said that once they got there, they just had to live there. It takes the whole day to get there from the nearest town, and part of that day is a continuous five hour climb. It called it a logistical nightmare. So it's one of those things where have you ever been in a very unusual place or a place that was very difficult to get to, and you just thought, you know, while i'm here, I'm gonna do everything I can. That's what they're doing in this cave. They're saying, Okay, while we're here, let's get all of the information that that we can find. This is a logistical nightmare. But the nightmare has paid off because it appears that this cave was not used once is tremendously important distinction. This cave was not something that Uh, an early human being accidentally happened to spend the night in right and then left their tools and went on their merry way. This cave was used over thousands of years by various people. It was kind It was like a trocoldtic version of a hotel. As use trocolate dietic again last time. But what we mean here is was a long It was a long standing known temporary refuge for some sort of nomadic people, and they must have communicated knowledge of this cave two later generations, possibly via oral history. Maybe enough time passed that that oral history became legend. You can imagine that it might have been some kind of religious religious pilgrimage of some sort or something. I mean again, that's me completely making it up, but you can imagine that something like that could be the scenario. Because of what they've been finding. There could be a very special cave for one reason or another that we just don't know yet. Yeah, we don't know. That's the thing that the history is so thin here because of all the time that has passed. What we do know is that the conventional story many people were taught needs some revision. It needs to be updated. It's astonishing because most of North America was covered with ice during that ice age. So if people were leaving tools in this cave at this time, and if they were migrating coastally right or however they got here, it means that they got here before that ice age began, or that means it's possible they did. So this means that despite everything, a lot of people were taught in grade school. It appears that at least very small numbers of human beings lived in North America and possibly other parts of these two continents, Central and South America during and immediately after the last ice Age, And what we thought was the first migration is actually a second or subsequent wave. The human population grew larger after this pre read of abrupt kind of global warming that started fourteen to fifteen thousand years ago. So don't call it a come back. They've always been here, right, It's strange. Oh yeah, And I think that study also suggested that some people had entered the America as before twenty nine thousand years ago, and that's possibly along the Pacific coast. Um And one final note, um anthropologist Matthew Delorius of California State UH in San Bernardino raises a really important question to kind of leave you with, Um, how could ancient people who had been in the America's for more than twenty five thousand years have remained quote archaeologically invisible for over ten thousand years? Um? And and he had he has an answer, he he does. But but his big question there is raised from the fact that in other places like Australia, in Japan, archaeologists have had no difficulty in finding evidence of human occupation and from that same time period they've been able to dig down and find Oh wow, yeah, this is this is from twenty thousand years ago. Um, why haven't American archaeologists found that, or you know, South American North American archaeology, why haven't we found the same things? And his statement to that idea is, quote, archaeologists in the America's have either been doing things very wrong for the last ninety years, or we have here an anomaly that must be accounted for. It makes a lot of sense to me. We it's it's an anomaly either way. I would say, it feels like an anomaly that must be accounted for. Right. And that's not the only big discovery though there The this one I'm gonna mention here isn't as recent. It goes back to the turn of the millennium, back in two thousand and even before that. There's a place in Brazil. It's a national park called Sarah the Capivara. It's uh, there's there are several sites there. I think there are four hundred or something archaeological dig sites in this national park and in a few of them there have been paintings, um these amazing cave paintings as well as other evidence of human life in that area. That appears to go back twenty two thousand years and perhaps even further in Brazil. So again, that's humanity in South America in Brazil a long time before the history books would would say that we are. But that is a whole different story for another day. That also, listeners will note that's that's pretty far from the Pacific coast. It is really is so both sides. It appears of the continents where we're being visited by humans, at least visited, if not lived upon. So what do you think, folks, when did the first human beings actually reach the American continents? Let us know we'd love to hear your thoughts. You can find us all sorts of places on the Internet. And also, do you think we've got anything wrong when it comes to the history of humanity on the planet. Do you think there's something being hidden from us? Do you think there's something we just haven't discovered yet? Anything along those realms we'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter where we're conspiracy Stuff, on Instagram where conspiracy Stuff Show. 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From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of I Heart Radio Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They call me Ben. We are joined as always with our super producer, Paul Mission controlled decond. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. We're diving into some hidden history today. We're diving into as odd as the phrase may sound, something new about history, because Faulkner was right. Of course, the past isn't even the past yet. History is never over. It's an ongoing conversation. Most people living on the continents of North and South America are comparatively recent arrivals, right, while many people living in both South and North America have a long family history here. Uh. If you look at the larger scheme of human migration across the planet, human beings are kind of a new thing for these two continents. We know roughly, we know ballpark. The story of humanity. Ancestral primates evolved on the African continent and from there our species spread around the globe. However, even today, in on August seven, as we record this, our species still gets bogged down in the details, especially when we get to the timeline. So today's question, when did human beings actually reach the American continents? Here are the facts Most experts within the fields the various fields of science, anthropology, and the like. They agree that the story of the contents of South and North America, at least as we understand them now, they didn't begin with humans on them, or humans were not there very early. These landmasses were home to a lot of creatures, a lot of animals, a lot of flora and fauna well before human beings arrived. And of course, if you're taking the really long look at the Earth, there are millions and millions of years where humans weren't here, but there were other creatures. But the big question for today is how did humans specifically get here onto North and South America. Well, the most common theory is this idea that involves Clovis culture and the Bearing Land Bridge. By about fourteen thousand years ago, the first human beings to reach the America's came by crossing the Bearing Strait, which was this land bridge between the far northeastern part of Siberia and the western the farthest most western part of Alaska. UM. This theory, known as the Bearing land bridge theory, is the one many of us grew up listen hearing about, you know, the school. It actually makes a lot of sense. It's the closest connection between Asia and North America and it only opens when ice is locked up on land and then sea level drops. Yeah, there is a logic here if we're talking about early human migration that we're talking about people basically walking right and probably following sources of food, maybe other animals that they rely on for sustenance. So it makes sense that they would be able to walk to North America from literally the only walkable path, which is this bearing land bridge across the street that you're describing. No, and all of this is based on the idea that early humans were unable to craft some kind of boat or ship that would be able to traverse the Pacific or Atlantic oceans in the way that we, you know, began to be able to do as technology developed. Um that they'll just remember that. That's why scientists always focus on that land bridge because of the walkability as been said. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point, Matt. And you know, let's get in front of the obvious question that many of us are going to immediately ask, which is, why can I not walk across that bridge today? Why do I have to take a boat or a flight, or why do I have to go on a doomed mission to swim the Pacific to reach Asia from the America's Well, it's because we are living in a different time. Back when, according to this theory, people walked from Asia to North America, they were doing so during something called the last Glacial Maximum or l g M. If this comes up so often in conversation that you don't have time to say the whole thing, also known as the previous ice age, the most recent ice age, the most recent ice age, Yeah, the one before the next one, which maybe we'll be around to see. Who knows, Uh, it's I can't I can't rule anything out at this point. So, back when people were traversing the land in this way, much more of Earth's water was existing in solid form in glaciers. And now the difference between then and now is that the sea levels have risen, so the bridge and the land these people walked is underwater, meaning also that much of the evidence of their migration is going to be lost to time, as the conventional wisdom goes, by this time, fourteen thousand, fifteen thousand years ago, humans had migrated across the breadth of South and North America. You go up to modern day Alaska, you've got humans. Go down to Chile, you got humans. The West coast is riddled with them. You go to northeastern Canada, you've got people everywhere. You go down to Florida, boom, same thing, people plus gators this time. So what we're telling you right now is the official, most often told story. And I want to pause here for you guys. Does this track with what with Noel Matt? Does this track with what you learned or were taught growing up about human migration? Basically? Yeah, yeah, this is precisely what what I recall from world history classes both in high school and in college. Essentially what we what we've just described here, the Clovis theory, the closed hunters, and the evidence that we have found of their lives back in those days. And it was a long time ago, but you know, when you look at the span of what we know about humanity and the evidence that we found it wasn't it wasn't that long ago. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I think this story is going to be familiar to many of us because you you grow up in elementary school, middle school, high school, as you said, Matt, you go to college and you'll still hear some version of this. But the problem here is pretty apparent. With every single nude discovery about the ancient past and the story of humanity's migration from one place to the next, well, we find the story gets less and less clear cut. We don't have we we don't have specific points of time and shifts of patterns. Right, we don't have the origin story of humanity. And this is something that has baffled us on this show since before Oh gosh, we like we were doing this show when science discovered new mix tapes of early humanity. Right, Dennis Sylvans, what was the other Homo floriensis? Yeah. Uh. The point I'm making here is that we have been taught a story. We have been sold a narrative in a very authority titive way, but everything we are learning as a species indicates that story is not as accurate as we are led to believe it is when we are children in school. So that's the question, when did human beings actually arrive in the America's Before we jump in, Ben, I just want to dovetail off what you're saying there. We have been sold this essentially and told this all of our lives. Everyone listening right now, I would say, just to make it a little more positive, because it's the best it's the best picture we've been able to paint with the information we've had up to this point, right. And the the problem, I think, the biggest problem that we're going to be tackling today that we have to address, is that once that picture is painted, anytime new information, these new discoveries that you're talking about, Ben, come through, it becomes more and more difficult to convince the painters of that picture that there needs to be some revisions, right because especially if it's a single point or discovery in one place or a discuss, you know, one person's one team's discovery rather than three or four in an area. That's kind of the biggest problem. I see what you're saying, and it's important because we're we're talking about discovering single points of information, right, single instances and what are single instances or examples against a larger body of thoughts, you know what I mean? Oh yeah, And I mean those high school textbooks aren't like infinitely long. They gotta figure out how to tell a version of the story that is as close to the likely scenario as possible and teaches you something about the history of you know, life. But you're right, it is problematic. It can be, for sure, because who you know, there's so much cantankerousness and science too. If people making one discovery and then another crew making something that conflicts with that narrative, and then there's this kind of beef as to how it really happened. But there's a lot of politics wrapped up in it and all of that. So it's interesting for sure to see the way these things kind of take on a life of their own, especially like you said, once the Badgers out of the bag was Ben would Sam. Yeah, that's that's the issue here. We want to be very clear. We're not accusing your history textbook publishers of purposely lying to you, and we are certainly not accusing your favorite history teachers from grade school of lying to you. Teachers work incredibly hard Uh. They are some of the most important people on the planet in my opinion. Uh. And they're not out to beguile and deceive you, hopefully they're they're not supposed to be. However, they're working with the information they have, right, And when we look at the realm of science and how science is communicated or disseminated to the population, we see that to your point, met sometimes people cling to a thing because it is the established fact now that does that. That is indicative of a lack of skepticism or a lack of critical thinking. It's also a very human understandable things psychologically speaking. Right. I don't want to, uh, I don't want to seem as though we are being dismissive or derogatory towards the many people who have spent their entire academic careers studying various incredibly specific aspects of Clovis theory or the current official story of human migration. But I will say in the past, I am sure there are people who spent decades researching one thing and published about it, and then they're there, and then new evidence was discovered that disproved or challenged their life's work, and so they just kind of you know, played it to the left. What am I gonna do after forty five years in the game change my mind? Would be a better world if people did that, but they often don't. Yeah, it's it's another situation where once you have this established fact, you have to go far and beyond to prove that you're that that fact needs to be altered or negated, right you. That's why it becomes so difficult, um to make these big changes to two existing stories. And they are stories. Don't don't don't kid yourself. These are stories that we are constructing based on the things that we have found. And as we tackle this big question today, when did humans arrive in the America's we're going to realize that this thing is much more complicated than we expected. And we'll tell you all about it right after a word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. You see, the timeline is shifting on us. The things we treated with such certitude turn out to be much less absolute than we had imagined. And it again, it goes back to the timeline. I think that's that's a big part of what the three of us are talking about today. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you may recall that we only said human beings were spread across the continents by fourteen to fifteen thousand years ago UM. For authors like Craig Childs, this shows that humanity by this point was most likely already pretty well spread throughout one or more areas of the continents before this. And there's several major theories that explain this. So let's start with a theory that we sort of talked about at the top of the show, UH, the Clovis first theory. This is the idea that the first human migration happened after the last glacial maximum, which is exactly what it sounds like UM, and this migration later went into decline UM, only to be followed up by you know, subsequent waves of humans from other parts of the world. So this connects all of these first inhabitants of the America's with the Clovis culture UM, which is something called a prehistorica paleo American culture that's named for the distinctive stone tools that were found in Clovis, New Mexico in the twenties UM. This also rolls into that bearing land straight idea, which we've talked about in previous episodes and or at the top of this one. So this is your I guess. In the UK they would call it your bog standard explanation for how human beings ended up on these continents. It's strange because this concept existed for a very long time, despite the fact that there were so many questions about it. If you look at the Clovis culture, the Clovis people, you'll find an historical mystery. It's as if they appeared out of nowhere and then suddenly disappeared. Radio carbon dating tells us that what we regard as the people of the Clovis culture appeared in modern day America around nine thousand, two hundred b C. And then five years later they vanished. So the the important distinction there that that you're bringing up now is the idea that these folks came over after that glacial maximum, after that ice age, around the decline of that ice age, they were able to traverse the siege perilous of the Bearing Strait, and they were from there able to spread throughout the continent. But of course this theory did not exist in a vacuum. There are many other theories about early humans arriving on these continents, and for centuries, people have argued back and forth about this even before they could find solid evidence. What I mean by this is, even before we had scientific standards for collecting, cataloging, and contextualizing evidence and information, we had many, many beliefs in civilization about humanity's origin story. On this continent, you will find numerous religions that argue some some version of an original person springing out of whole cloth or in some cases being created by a divine entity on on these continents. And then you will also see further research that's admittedly more secular, uh, that kind of forensically traces what we know about people on the planet on other continents, right like we this is let's just say it coastal migration. Could people have gotten here by boats? Because if you can build a boat, that seems at least a little bit it seems a little bit easier to travel to this new land via watercraft than to walk through the frozen way lands of the bearing straight. Oh. Absolutely, And note here that we're talking about coastal migration and that sounds exactly like you imagine it to be. That is, following along a coast at you know, some distance far enough away from it, but essentially following the water along a coast on a boat of some kind. That doesn't mean going straight out into the ocean right the way the way you can with larger ships and more reliable ships. Now, uh, it's very different. So there are a lot of sources, there are a lot of people institutions, and there's some research that suggests that this may be a possibility coastal migration. So we know for for sure that in places like Japan and parts of Korea South Korea, there have been amazing archaeological discoveries that have found that humans during the Ice Age were able to navigate coastal waters even though it was so frigid and there's ice in many places, they were able to do that, and they were essentially navigating the northern Pacific coasts of what is now modern or what we would consider modern day Japan and Korea and come chaka with with boats. So it's really no stretch to imagine that humans at some point, perhaps we're able to reach the America's by boat using coastal migration. And here's why it makes sense, because you could right at the end of the Ice Age there where we're imagining that people were physically walking across that bearing straight. Perhaps they were on boats just previous to the end of that glacial maximum, or during the maximum, or even after it, taking boats and following the coast, because you'd end up in Alaska, you'd get to British Columbia, then down south to Washington, to Oregon, all along the Pacific coast of what is now the United States. And it's pretty incredible that humanity, even during an ice age, was able to both survive and prosper and even migraine. It's strange to think about the world in in that way, to imagine a contiguous coast. And I like the point you're making that about the watercraft involved, because you know, these aren't cargo ships. These aren't mega yachts or or schooners or frigoteens or pontoons or I'm just naming boat boat words. Now, does anybody else have a boat? Where? What's up? One? You like? No frigate, frigate, yeah, frigging frigate. These were none of those things. These were Yes, these were not even tugboats. They were they were small coastal craft right like brown water Navy kind of stuff. They weren't meant to go into the open ocean. They were just kind of tracing along the line of the coast, but if that coast is never ending, so they're just sort of following a thing, and it's like a video game wherein there, you know there is a larger world out there. You have a rough idea of the parts of the map you've seen, but everything else is obscured, you know what I mean. So so you may as well imagine that you are just always on the same coast of a thing you call the land. Who knows if there's anything other than the land and then you know the water. What is compelling about that to me is what what spurred that movement? And you know, we we discussed we discussed the migration of animals that were used for hunting right for food for the populations, as a possible reason to just continue down the coast if fish populations, maybe because it's obvious that those boats were would be used for fishing purposes, for catching food. Um, you know, I wonder if there was something This is completely just off the top of my head, but I wonder what the thing was that spurred whichever group, however large or small it was, to continue down that coast and just to keep going to see what's what's next. Oh, I wish I knew. I mean necessity, I would imagine, but I wonder if it wasn't, I wouldn't wonder it was a spiritual belief or or um something that's deep inside. I think all of us to just find out, well, there's something over there. Let's let's find out that's inspiring, you know, especially now as the next big step in space exploration may occur within our lifetimes. One one other thing that may have happened just environmentally is people may have just been following the recession of the ice. Depending on where you put them in the timeline, people may have just been going further along the coast because they were able to see more of the coast. I'm not being dismissive. I'm just saying, like it the environment appears to change so slowly that you might not be fully aware of how far you're migrating because you're you know, your grandparents, we're miles away or kilometers away for the rest of the world, and then you two generations later still feel like you're by the edge of the ice. But the ice itself has moved, So I think we're gonna take one more quick break and then we're gonna get into some new discoveries when we return. So um, there have been some efforts recently, some research that's kinda put this traditional narrative on its head a bit um, And that includes some stuff very very recently published just in the last month. In a paper known called the Timing and Effect of the Earliest Human Arrivals in North America, uh Lorena Bassara Valdiva and Thomas I am Um look into a pretty awesome and bizarre discovery. What they found was a piece of limestone from this very specific cave, the Chiquahite Cave in north central Mexico, that could potentially prove that humans actually first arrived on the continent much much early here than that narrative would have us believe, the one we know from school. Yes, uh, I've waited for this, Okay. So, like many of our fellow listeners, we grew up. I don't want to speak for everybody, let me let me clarify. I grew up convinced that there was hidden history everywhere, you know, and I was I was certain, probably just because I was a jerk, that human beings had all these ancient civilizations and that they had a much longer time on these two continents specifically, and without getting into the weeds on all the crazy stuff that's out there, this is different because this is proof. This is quantitative proof that the first people, if people built these tools you're mentioning, all arrived on North and South America, like thirty three thousand years ago. That's nuts just to put, just to put in perspective how much time that is. I hope no one gets mad at me for bringing this up. Was forty years ago, right, So, like, I think that's gonna hit people when you think about thirty three thousand years. Yeah, I mean, let's just pretend that humans live a hundred years, right, that's three hundred and thirty human like human cycles iterations. Yeah. Yeah, it's a it's a very it's very long story. And you know, for quite a while, there would be various people propagating what was essentially some narrative without proof. They would say, you know, I have had a spiritual awakening and I realized that the true story of insert usually specific brand of people here is that they came to modern day South or Central America or North America, uh like after the Fall of Atlantis or the sinking of Lemuria or something. And the problem is they didn't have proof. This is different because this is not tinfoil hat territory. Archaeologists in this cave discovered specifically three deliberately shaped pieces of limestone. They discovered a pointing stone and two cutting flakes. Right now, pending new discoveries, these are the oldest human made tools discovered on these continents. They absolutely do not fit that timeline we were all taught in school. They also they're also just one of several discoveries in this cave. Because this cave is like a an episode of Hoarders where the hoarder is just collecting sediment. The archaeologists spent a lot of arduous time digging carefully through various layers of sediment. It's kind of like a time capsule time machine. And these tools they found are in like the very back of the cave, in the deepest layer of the random rocks and pebbles and bits of sediment that have accumulated there over time. This is important because when we know the layer in which they were found, we have an enormous head start on figuring out when they were left in that layer, and these things were here way before the last glacial maximum, way before the last ice age that occurred, like what between twenty six thousand and nineteen thousand years ago, which means before that, someone was in this cave and they had made tools and they they forgot them. So if you think about it, because somebody did the equivalent of forgetting their keys at home, we are upending the story of human history thousands of years later. We truly are. And we're gonna tell you more about how this discovery was occurred. But I want to jump to another recent article from Nature that was published in July of this year, and it is titled evidence of human occupation in Mexico around the Last Glacial Maximum, and I'm going to read a quick quote from the abstract of it just to give you an understanding what's happening here. It's pretty incredible because not only did they find those limestone artifacts that we're talking about, there are those tools. There was a lot more and there is a lot more still being found right now. So from this article, it states the site yielded about one thousand, nine hundred stone artifacts within a three meter deep stratus stratified sequence, revealing a previously unknownlithic industry that underwent only minor changes over millennia. More than fifty radio carbon and luminescence dates provide chronological control and genetic, paleo, environmental, and chemical data that document the changing environments in which the occupants lived. Now, that is when you're talking about finding proof, right that you could be able to show to another scientist, to fellow sciences and say, hey, look at all of this data we've collected from these things. You're you're talking about several different ways in which they are testing this stuff, with luminescence testing, with radio carbon testing. Um. I mean, it's pretty incredible stuff here, and it really does show that humans were in that cave, as Ben said, way before that ice age. And these researchers and scientists who are there in that cave are continuing and they're gonna keep digging and they're gonna keep looking and who knows what else we're going to discover. But the reason why it took so long to find this stuff, and it will take a long time to probably find more, is because of how difficult it is to reach this location. This is this is kind of a sunk cost for those poor archaeologists. Uh. The lead author of one of those studies is very very clear about how much of a pain in the key stre it is to get to this cave at all. He said that once they got there, Cypriot Arduently by the way, lead author of that that's so you're mentioning, Mattuh, he said that once they got there, they just had to live there. It takes the whole day to get there from the nearest town, and part of that day is a continuous five hour climb. It called it a logistical nightmare. So it's one of those things where have you ever been in a very unusual place or a place that was very difficult to get to, and you just thought, you know, while i'm here, I'm gonna do everything I can. That's what they're doing in this cave. They're saying, Okay, while we're here, let's get all of the information that that we can find. This is a logistical nightmare. But the nightmare has paid off because it appears that this cave was not used once is tremendously important distinction. This cave was not something that Uh, an early human being accidentally happened to spend the night in right and then left their tools and went on their merry way. This cave was used over thousands of years by various people. It was kind It was like a trocoldtic version of a hotel. As use trocolate dietic again last time. But what we mean here is was a long It was a long standing known temporary refuge for some sort of nomadic people, and they must have communicated knowledge of this cave two later generations, possibly via oral history. Maybe enough time passed that that oral history became legend. You can imagine that it might have been some kind of religious religious pilgrimage of some sort or something. I mean again, that's me completely making it up, but you can imagine that something like that could be the scenario. Because of what they've been finding. There could be a very special cave for one reason or another that we just don't know yet. Yeah, we don't know. That's the thing that the history is so thin here because of all the time that has passed. What we do know is that the conventional story many people were taught needs some revision. It needs to be updated. It's astonishing because most of North America was covered with ice during that ice age. So if people were leaving tools in this cave at this time, and if they were migrating coastally right or however they got here, it means that they got here before that ice age began, or that means it's possible they did. So this means that despite everything, a lot of people were taught in grade school. It appears that at least very small numbers of human beings lived in North America and possibly other parts of these two continents, Central and South America during and immediately after the last ice Age, And what we thought was the first migration is actually a second or subsequent wave. The human population grew larger after this pre read of abrupt kind of global warming that started fourteen to fifteen thousand years ago. So don't call it a come back. They've always been here, right, It's strange. Oh yeah, And I think that study also suggested that some people had entered the America as before twenty nine thousand years ago, and that's possibly along the Pacific coast. Um And one final note, um anthropologist Matthew Delorius of California State UH in San Bernardino raises a really important question to kind of leave you with, Um, how could ancient people who had been in the America's for more than twenty five thousand years have remained quote archaeologically invisible for over ten thousand years? Um? And and he had he has an answer, he he does. But but his big question there is raised from the fact that in other places like Australia, in Japan, archaeologists have had no difficulty in finding evidence of human occupation and from that same time period they've been able to dig down and find Oh wow, yeah, this is this is from twenty thousand years ago. Um, why haven't American archaeologists found that, or you know, South American North American archaeology, why haven't we found the same things? And his statement to that idea is, quote, archaeologists in the America's have either been doing things very wrong for the last ninety years, or we have here an anomaly that must be accounted for. It makes a lot of sense to me. We it's it's an anomaly either way. I would say, it feels like an anomaly that must be accounted for. Right. And that's not the only big discovery though there The this one I'm gonna mention here isn't as recent. It goes back to the turn of the millennium, back in two thousand and even before that. There's a place in Brazil. It's a national park called Sarah the Capivara. It's uh, there's there are several sites there. I think there are four hundred or something archaeological dig sites in this national park and in a few of them there have been paintings, um these amazing cave paintings as well as other evidence of human life in that area. That appears to go back twenty two thousand years and perhaps even further in Brazil. So again, that's humanity in South America in Brazil a long time before the history books would would say that we are. But that is a whole different story for another day. That also, listeners will note that's that's pretty far from the Pacific coast. It is really is so both sides. It appears of the continents where we're being visited by humans, at least visited, if not lived upon. So what do you think, folks, when did the first human beings actually reach the American continents? Let us know we'd love to hear your thoughts. You can find us all sorts of places on the Internet. And also, do you think we've got anything wrong when it comes to the history of humanity on the planet. Do you think there's something being hidden from us? Do you think there's something we just haven't discovered yet? Anything along those realms we'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter where we're conspiracy Stuff, on Instagram where conspiracy Stuff Show. 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